Citizens Medical Center receives 2 awards

Citizens Medical Center received two awards, putting the hospital in the top 3 percent of hospitals in the nation.

Mike Olson, CEO, announced the awards at the monthly board meeting Wednesday.

The hospital received the Outstanding Patient Experience Award and the Patient Safety Excellence Award for 2017 from Healthgrades, an organization that evaluates hospitals across the country.

"There are some really positive things happening in terms of these recognitions," Olson said. "These are a couple areas that we really emphasize, is patient safety and patient experience . We're excited about some of the recognitions we are achieving."

Olson also gave a report on the Leadership Development Institute. Three times a year, hospital managers and the leadership team gather for the session. The focus of the most recent session, April 5, was leadership, Olson said.

The CEO went over 12 leadership principals he's acquired over the course of his career.

"Leadership is really simply modeling the behavior you want to see, connecting with the people that you lead and involving them as much as possible in the process of what's going on," he said.

One of Olson's leadership principals is recognition, he said. Olson asked his leadership staff at the session to focus more on how they can recognize staff and recognize people in the organization.

"I asked them at least on a weekly basis (to) think of at least two people they can thank for something that they did for them," he said. "If all of us can do that on a weekly basis consistently, there's going to be a lot of people feeling more appreciated and recognized."

Olson also talked with staff about appropriateness and etiquette regarding email.

Duane Woods, hospital chief financial officer, also spoke about the budgeting process regarding how employees are staffed, how the hospital compares with other organizations, staff ratios and budgeting principals and processes.

"Some good educational things took place related to how we budget and the importance of the budget," Olson said. "This is something that they need to own and help us to develop."

Leadership staff also heard about the hospital's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and strategic planning.